visnum

Obviously, I use Google Adsense to monetize several of my blogs. I am not a person who committed himself to make money out of blogging. I just evaluate, appreciate and use it. It is useful. It can pay the cost of my web hosting services.

However, as a geek and a former marketing / advertising worker, I do some research on the web advertising market. I do that research virtually irregularly. You cannot have enough idea just by looking at what I say on the issue. I am going to share my opinion anyway.

When it comes to online marketing, advertiser’s part is fairly easy in comparison to the publisher’s. The online advertiser have reach to many tools and these tools can measure the return on investment (ROI) fairly well. On the other hand, there are many uncertainties on the side of the publisher.

Whatever the publisher does in order to get an idea about what keywords (thus, what topics) to deal with, there is always a great percentage of chance involved.

The publisher can get the hang of keyword value mathematically but what about the order and the timing when and how the ads are going to be published. If you do every work on your part and don’t relay on a third party advertising publisher like Google Adsense or Yahoo Advertising Network, then results would be more predictable. In that case, your business will not be feasible because you will need great marketing budget and effort to promote your ad spaces. Therefore, this is not a solution to a more predictable outcome.

Suppose that you did research in order select a topic for your new website from which you expect advertising revenue. Then imagine that you finally decide on a supposed to be profitable topic. Then you work on your articles or posts and you publish them. You do everything to provide a good placement in search engines and you start displaying related ads on your website.

This is the publisher’s part.

Now, the fact is, any advertiser on your topic has a budget and his budget declines with every click. Since you are not the sole content provider on that topic, there is a great chance that his budget reaches to zero before any advertising are clicked on your website.

The problem is clear. There are no gambling at the side of the advertiser but there is a great effect of chance on the side of the publisher.

All of this information can be gathered in the future, maybe. Moreover, you can mathematically have the information as possibilities or probabilities but never as exact predictions of the real result.

So, this is why traffic and targeted traffic is so important. You have two competition. One of them is the advertisers budget that day or that hour. The other is the possibility of websites publishing something on the same topic. The only way you can have your way out of this situation is working on traffic. Therefore there are still a lot of catch-all websites. If publishing vertically on a certain topic would be the only wise move to solve these problems then we would not see that much website with topics on anything that comes to your mind at the same time at the same page.

Day by day, it’s getting more difficult to surf the net without losing your sanity. I don’t even mention the risk of getting blind between highly different color palettes.

Well, the trouble is that there are too much source of news out there. You want to stay updated and you don’t want to see bs at the same time. You have to eliminate and decrease your sources of news. Here are some tips to do just that.

Select a couple of technology evangelists and subscribe to their blog only. Keep the number of them at 10 max. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds of Digg’s, del.icio.us’, slashdot’s frontpages and any sub sections that you feel it’s a must read for you.

The trick is that too many people blog about the same news and information but only a few people provide posts with valuable insight and credible information. You have to be selective.

Avoid getting distracted by news about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Myspace, and a couple more famous persons and web sites. You can be pretty much sure about that there is nothing new. If there is, you will always get informed by the blog posts of technology evangelsits that you have subscribed.

Don’t be deceived by top ten lists about best Photoshop tutorials, Youtube videos, hosting prices and alike. Those articles are usually made for making the front page on popular social bookmarking sites. If you will have the need, you can always make a search on those link sites and find them when you need them.

And finally, know that the web is for you and you are not here for the web. Web 2.0 is something that you will use. It is not there to use you.

Nowadays, I see posts about Robert Scoble and his blog and his job and his nearly everything here and there. These posts mostly talk about Scoble’s views on certain products that he writes up in his blog. Others are simply hate propaganda against Robert Scoble.

I don’t specially like or dislike Robert. I just think that he is a clever, special guy who likes to initiate discussions in a provocative fashion. His provocativeness is a must as a journalist. And yes, he is a journalist. He does interviews. He does it well, I think.

His provocative posts are generally about comparing two or more products or services. For instance, once he questioned whether Apple imitates Microsoft. There have been 230 comments under this post so far and he made people to come out and talk. Okay, I know that topics like Microsoft vs Anything can be quite intriguing at times but he has the ability to achieve more buzz than an ordinary Microsoft vs. Oranges and Apples kind of comparisons.

Another nice post to play with from Scoble was about why United States will remain dominant in tech. He claimed that United States will remain dominant in tech because Iran and some other countries mistreat their citizens. Robert Scoble knows very well that there are lots of countries on earth that are coming really close in competition on tech. I don’t think that his claim was sincere. I think he just knows how to make a buzz.

For a last example, I will mention his post about how Microsoft is gonna edge in on Google. I am sure that Robert is joking here completely.

Now, more important than all this is how and why people react to Robert Scoble. I feel disturbed by the hate propaganda that some bloggers carry out against him. I just don’t understand why they keep reading him if he discomforts them by his posts.

There must be something else, some other reason that some people hate Scoble and keep reading his posts. This isn’t just a love-to-hate situation.

My opinion is that those people don’t have the guts and the mindset to post like him. I think that is jealousy. Most people that blurbs about Robert Scoble blurb about him just because they think he gains and earns by something they cannot achieve. Those people cannot make something on their own, they feel needy most probably. Or at least, they cannot see the buzz he creates and they forgot that Robert Scoble is a journalist. One of his provocative posts was about comparing Windows Vista and Mac OS X. He needs this to do his job. He needs to and must podcast about odd things sometimes. That happens all the time, all day long with a whole press and media.

Anyway, my suggestion to those suffering from the Scoblenvy: Go try and create your own buzz and content. You are free to add any interesting content to your blogs. Do it and try to make it better than Scoble, then come and blurb about why Scoble makes no sense.

By the way, among the negative comments blurbs about Scoble, the oscar has to go to Yuvi who is a 15 year old Geek wannabe from Chennai, India. He is a VB and C# guy, but is trying to expand his horizons. He is the best representative of people who like to blurb about Robert Scoble.

update: Another post from Robert Scoble that drive people crazy. Now it is iPhone. Well, another reason why I think that Robert Scoble has a playful cleverness. There are many people out there, important names who blog about the iPhone recently. They write down very decent things, evaluating iPhone and the future of Apple, swot of opponents etc. but none of them get the attention that Scoble is getting right now. This isn’t Scoble’s way, that’s just what we call “social psychology” among academic jargon.